


Caribou

by Lia (Liafic)



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-30
Updated: 2012-09-30
Packaged: 2017-11-15 09:30:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,615
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/525806
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Liafic/pseuds/Lia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Soon, summer will end, and I will no longer wake up to the mist coming in over the bay.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Caribou

**Author's Note:**

  * For [profoundlycan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/profoundlycan/gifts).



I live in a town where nothing changes.

The mist drifts in from the bay every morning with the same salty coldness that I remember from childhood, and I fumble numbly over the coarse net as I help my father pull it into the boat. The _iqaluk_ flop and glisten by our feet, grey-pink over the wet plastic. My father runs a gloved hand across his forehead, pulling the hood of his parka lower. His eyes have darkened over the years to a deeper blue, like the ocean during a storm, and I have slowly grown into the ghost of my mother. But nothing has really changed. We still go fishing together on the weekends.

“We can do a couple over the fire later, all crispy,” he says, gently patting the slow-breathing fish still tangled in the net. “Might be the last run before winter.”

I nod absentmindedly, watching the water lap against the side of the boat. The rhythm of it makes me remember my mother and the dance that she taught me as a child, singing with arms moving like waves as my father beat the caribou drum and laughed. That was back when we were still a family, but now my mother is gone, and my brother has left us, and my father and I linger in the bay like two lost seals. Sometimes I wake up from dreams in which my mother has become Sedna, her hair fanning out in the water and her heart beating in the lonely rhythm of a drum.

“Better head back,” my father says with a sigh, and he starts the engine with a dull rumble.

I hold the net still as we cut through the water, and the char by my foot twitches a glittering fin, its mouth yawning in the cold air. Over the horizon, the sun is breaking like bright red wildfire, and I close my eyes in a long, delirious blink.

. . .

The sealift arrives in early October, and the café is always busy when the crew come to shore. June has outdone herself by making more bannock than the entire town could eat, and she has lined up carafes of hot coffee along the back wall. I sit by the window, watching the snow blur by with my hands buried in the pockets of my apron and my homework sitting untouched on the scarred table. When June comes out from the kitchen with flour smudged in a line across her chin, I move my books over so that she can flop down in the chair across from me with her mug and stare forlornly out at the street.

“Good read?” she says, gesturing vaguely at the folded pages of the book in front of her.

“Haven’t started yet.”

“Better get going. You want to be stuck in this place?”

I shake my head with a quiet smile, turning over the book and straightening out the crinkled pages, and June stirs her coffee. She comes from the warm summers and tree-lined streets of Montreal, but her fiancé is a supply pilot at YRT, and she is here for the foreseeable future. She burst into my life a year ago like a flickering ember, back when she first started working at the café, and we have been friends ever since.

“Here it comes,” she says, glancing out the window.

I can hear the crew laughing before I see them through the snow: male voices, dark hoods and scarves pulled up against the chill. When the little bell rings above the doorway, there is a hail of frost and stomping of ice off boots, and in that moment, something like the drum dance echoes in my mind. One of them pulls back his hood, and his eyes are the warm gold of sunrise, and he glances over at me with a half smile.

. . .

When Sokka was fourteen, I came home from visiting my mother at the hospital and found him passed out with a rag pressed between his fingers, the room filled with a lingering bitter smell like that of a car left running too long. I was too young to understand it. I only knew that my mother was sick, and Sokka was angry, and my father was trying to stay strong. I ran my hands over his damp forehead, pushed his hair back from his eyes, and folded that little rag before tucking it into his pocket.

The winter after my mother died, Sokka missed the caribou hunt because he couldn’t walk straight, bow dragging through the snow as he stumbled like a fawn, his words all tangled up. There were a lot of fights after that, yelling matches that made me cry and hide under my bed, straining to hear the push and pull of the tide. Part of me wondered why my father and brother hated one another, but even as a child I realised it must have been more than that. It was a painful kind of love, shattering slowly between them like the slow thaw of ice.

There was never any resolution, any closure. Sokka left three years later, and his bow still leans silently against the back wall of his bedroom like a restless spirit. These days, he calls me from Yellowknife, where he works in the mines and lives with his girlfriend. She is a wispy thing with a clear voice and hair dyed the pale ivory of the moon, and when I visited them this year, she pulled me aside in the cramped hallway of their apartment and told me that he had proposed, and something welled up inside me like sadness and loss and a wrenching sort of happiness.

“We want your mother to be the _atiq_ of our first child,” she told me breathlessly. “A girl. It’s going to be a girl.”

“No, that’s—wonderful. It’s wonderful,” I said, brushing the back of my hand across my eyes.

Sokka held me for a long time that night as I hovered on the doorstep with my bag over my shoulder and a plane ticket tucked into my purse, and I saw the shadow of my father somewhere inside him. I knew for the first time then that sometimes, there are no answers. Sometimes people just have to grow up and become strong. It had always been me, I realised, always me, trying to pull the remnants of our family back together like constantly patching a net. But maybe my niece will take after her _atiq_ , her name-soul. Maybe she will learn our traditions and come fishing with me and her grandfather. Maybe one day, I will teach her the drum dance that my mother taught me, and Sokka will finally go on that caribou hunt.

. . .

Zuko comes with the sealift again in the summer, after I have graduated and used my schoolwork to make a bonfire behind the café. Our friendship is natural and quiet, and he asks no hard questions. Tonight we sit in rickety chairs by the railing outside his motel room, watching a sun that sets later and later each day. The weather is milder now, but his hand still burns hot against my leg as the first stars come out.

“I got my letter,” I say, and then, with a laugh, “Three letters.”

He flashes me a white smile. “So which school will it be?”

“I guess—I mean, I don’t know.” I’m tracing my hands over the rusted black paint of the railing, years of snow and cold flaking away under my fingers. “I always used to think I wanted to get out of here, go south. Escape, or something. I don’t know.”

“This is your home, though,” he says. “Is that what you mean?”

“Yeah,” I say distantly. “I just never realised it until I could actually leave.”

Far away, the streetlights come on near the port, one of the only areas of the town that stays lit at night. I want to laugh when I think about it—this quiet town, the steady pace of northern life, the memory of eating arctic char with my father or holding my niece in my arms.

“I’ll miss it, I guess,” I say.

“You don’t have to leave, you know.”

“No, but—I think I need to.”

He nods, and when I look over at him, my shoulder brushes his, and the echo of drums beats through my memory. I suppose it happens as simply as that. He kisses me, and I kiss him, and his fingers push up under the hem of my shirt, around the curve of my ribs. We stumble back into his room like the end of a conversation, a hesitant half-walk of tangled arms and tongues—I crash against him like waves against rock, and my eyes flutter closed, and he shudders into me with a clenched breath as quiet as falling snow.

. . .

Soon, summer will end, and I will no longer wake up to the mist coming in over the bay. I will no longer spend my evenings talking until dark with June or smiling across the fire at my father. I will no longer wait to meet Zuko with a steadiness like the passing of seasons. My things are all packed in boxes in the kitchen, and my fur parka is folded on my bed. Where I am going, the sun will shine hot over the pavement, and no one will recognise the songs that I sing. But my home will be here, waiting for me like a mother waits for her children.

For now, I will walk the shore with my father, and watch the sun rise over the mouth of the bay.

**Author's Note:**

> So this was my attempt at a modern AU--I hope it was something even vaguely like what you were looking for.
> 
> (Thanks to Dev for beta reading.)


End file.
